Indeed I've never seen any compelling reason for it being a bad idea other than "Well, some distros were defaulting to the odd version because the stable one was missing so much stuff!".
The problem was that the odd-numbered versions weren't getting enough testing, so the real testing didn't happen until the even-numbered release. So the system seriously slowed the pace of kernel development without significantly improving stability.
Well, part of the reason for his CURRENT change is that there's not much stuff going on between releases, indicating that the pace of update is dropping so low that it would no longer be a problem.
You don't follow kernel development very closely, I see.:-)
It wouldn't need to be so dramatic, just bump the phone with another device (or another phone.) NFC simply doesn't have the bandwidth required to do what you're suggesting, and it could easily be configured to be doable without unlocking the device.
+1
If this becomes a thing -- and I strongly suspect it will -- I know the Android security team will be looking for a way to enable it such that police cannot get anything other than your DL data. Perhaps even a "police stop mode" which enables a lock screen even for users who don't normally lock their phones and turns on the NFC. How to make the UI on that easy to invoke in a hurry when you're flustered, but still out of the way, since it's only needed on rare occasions, is an interesting question challenge. I don't have any idea at the moment how such a feature would work, or if it's the best approach, but the nature of the requirement is pretty clear: Users must be able to provide officers with DL information, but officers must not be able to get any additional data.
(Disclaimer: I'm a member of Google's Android security team, but the above represents only my own opinions not an official statement. You can certainly believe that they're opinions I will be sharing/pushing internally, though.)
(Aside: I think my AC stalker has abandoned me. APK, where are you?)
Here's what I'd do if I were Linus: Bump to 4.0 now, then the next release go to (year-2010, month), so maybe 5.3. If there are two releases in a month (rare), add a third number to distinguish them.
No, it didn't. The numbers did have some meaning before v3.0, but not the semver meanings. Prior to v3, the first digit, the kernel version, was incremented only when there were major changes, as there were from 0 to 1 and 1 to 2. The second digit had special meaning; even values were for "stable" releases and odd values were for "development" releases. This ended when Linus realized that it wasn't getting him the sort of testing he wanted of the development releases, and was also encouraging too-large changes in the dev releases. So, as of 2.6.0, that ended and all new releases just incremented the third digit.
They dropped it because Linus felt the "39" in 2.6.39 was too big.
Sort of. Linus realized that the path he was on would never increment any number other than the third, so it wasn't just that 39 was too big, but that eventually it was going to be 2.6.539, and that it was silly to keep carrying the immutable "2.6" prefix. Hence 3.0.
Personally, I think he should just take the next step and go to a single integer... 4, 5, 6, etc. Either that or use dates. Say, (year-2010,month), so a release today would be 5.2. The release candidate process Linus uses and the pace of development pretty much ensure that there won't be a need for two releases in one month, but if there is a second release in one month a subminor could be added (e.g. 5.2.1).
No, coveting is more than just wanting. The text of the commandment (KJV, from memory so I may get a word or two wrong) is: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, nor thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s."
Coveting involves not just wanting something you don't have, but wanting to have something that belongs to someone else. It really is just a slightly strengthened form of "Thou shalt not steal" which makes it clear (in a foretaste of Christ's revision of the commandments in, e.g., Matthew 5:28) that merely wishing to do evil is is evil.
But there's nothing evil about winning a lottery. You aren't stealing anything when you win, and you aren't committing a milder form of theft when you wish to win. There's also no love of money implied by wishing to win a lottery, just as there is no love of money implied by choosing an educational path that leads to a remunerative career, etc. That sin is also one that requires a degree and a willingness to engage in unwholesome acts in order to achieve goals.
Like other forms of gambling, playing the lottery isn't wrong, it's just wasteful. So is most entertainment. Where gambling becomes wrong is when it is done to excess, when it destroys the financial security of the gambler. As long as you can treat gambling as an occasional small diversion, like seeing a movie, or going on an affordable (for your situation) vacation to Hawaii, etc., it's fine.
(My AC stalker seems to have abandoned me. <sniff>)
YMMV, and if the issue has caused you deep personal problems you probably disagree.
I should clarify that I didn't mean you personally had deep problems; I meant that perhaps you had a loved one or other close personal relation who was deeply troubled, and that impacted you. Or maybe it was you; it's no shame to be an addict. It happens, and removing the shame is one of the biggest hurdles society needs to overcome to deal well with addiction.
I agree that there are lots of people for whom gambling is dangerously addictive, and that is bad, and sad. However, I'm sufficiently libertarian that I believe in the right of people to screw themselves if they choose to... and sufficiently socially-minded that I approve of programs that try to help such self-damaging people. IMO, the right solution to that sort of problem isn't to ban the danger, it's to help the people who fall into its clutches. YMMV, and if the issue has caused you deep personal problems you probably disagree.
(And, no, you're not my stalker. I can tell because you know how to spell and construct a grammatically-correct sentence. My stalker has been strangely quiet ever since I started calling him out on every post. I'm beginning to think he no longer cares. <sniff>)
the lottery ticket often has net value for its worth as entertainment. It's fun thinking about what you'd do if you suddenly had $200M.
Have you ever thought about stealing the lottery's entertainment? I can get your $2 entertainment for $0.
I think you missed the following sentence from my post:
I can do that (and sometimes do) without actually buying a lottery ticket, but paying the $2 for a ticket makes it dramatically more intense, and therefore entertaining.
Having the ticket convinces my statistically-incompetent lizard brain that there's a chance it will actually happen, because said statistically-incompetent lizard brain is completely incapable of grokking small probability events -- and that same lizard brain has a direct line to the pleasure centers.
You have an AC stalker? How do I get one of those?
Hmmm - maybe post more than once every six months...
I can tell you how I did it... you know those APK crapflood posts, about how hosts files are great and AdBlock is evil? Just respond to a few of those criticizing the crapflooding.
Id be much more inclined to play the lottery if the pot were between 50k and 1m, as it would have a far lesser chance of ruining my life.
I think it's a lot of fun to try to figure out how you could handle the money without it ruining your life.
IMO the first step is to work very hard to arrange it so that no one knows that you won. If you find yourself in possession of a lottery ticket worth $100M+, your next action should be to hire an attorney to arrange to collect the prize anonymously. After that you should work with your attorney (and probably you'll end up with a staff of them) to figure out how to arrange a cover story that allows you to ease into a higher class of lifestyle and out of the need to be employed (assuming that's what you want) without making it obvious to family and friends that you're suddenly filthy rich. You want to have something that makes it look reasonable that you can afford to drive a nicer car and buy a nicer house and take a nice vacation and not work so much, but without giving anyone the idea that you could give them tens of thousands, or millions, of dollars if you wanted.
What's trickier is to figure out how to give money to the people you want to give money to without making it clear where it came from; what would really be ideal is if your cover story explained a sudden windfall for your close friends and relatives as well. You might have to adjust the recipient list in order to make it look like you're just one of the group, and not its center.
(Aside: Now we'll see if my AC stalker -- everyone should have one -- crapfloods responses to this post.)
You have insurance? Same thing: the expected return on insurance is also negative (insurers need to make a profit somehow, after all), and based on that value it seems silly to have it... until you ask the owner of the uninsured house that burned down.
Red herring. The expected value of your insurance is fairly close to its cost. More importantly, if the probability that your insurance would have to pay out were astronomically low, it wouldn't, in fact, make sense to buy insurance. But it's not. The probability that something will happen that causes you to need that insurance is non-negligible.
With that said, I find this conversation funny because both sides are ignoring the whole point of the article, which is that even if the cost of the lottery ticket exceeds its expected value (and it usually does), and even if the odds of winning are so small as to be negligible (for big prizes they always are), the lottery ticket often has net value for its worth as entertainment.
It's fun thinking about what you'd do if you suddenly had $200M. Really, it is. I can entertain myself for hours just thinking about strategies to manage it that wouldn't ruin my life by causing people to hound me for money, and yet still allow me to do the things that I want. I can do that (and sometimes do) without actually buying a lottery ticket, but paying the $2 for a ticket makes it dramatically more intense, and therefore entertaining. I don't buy many lottery tickets; I've probably purchased two or three in the last twenty years, but I've always felt like I got good value from them.
(Now we'll see if my AC stalker crapfloods responses to this post.)
Did you read the report before talking about short-sighted comments?
For those who don't want to read a 30-page report just to decide if you have a valid point (or if the report you linked is even relevant), I'll provide the summary that you should have provided, and try to guess at the argument you were trying to make (but didn't):
The report argued (in 2001, before the bubble and collapse) that much of the growth in housing was driven by relaxed lending which allowed more segments of the market to buy homes, and that this growth was driving an increase in prices. It further argued that if we saw a significant economic collapse, particularly a large rise in unemployment, that this effect could collapse.
Your argument, I presume, is that buying a house is risky because the price could collapse, leaving the borrower "upside down", holding a large debt they can't pay.
(Now we'll see if my AC stalker crapfloods responses to this post.)
I wonder what would have happened had they not had Google Translate. A boy?
Depending on the circumstances, the alternative could have been death of mother and/or baby. The alternative almost certainly would have been an even more unpleasant experience for the mother, with no ability to communicate with the EMTs about her state or the progress of the birth.
(Now let's see if my AC stalker shows up to crapflood responses to this post, too.)
"Fitbit only usable device, Nike Fuelband total shit".
I think they're all quite usable. In this space utility is not dependent on accuracy, for most people, because for most people it really doesn't matter if you get an extremely accurate step count. What matters is that you get a reasonable estimate of your activity level, as compared with you activity level measured on other days.
Fitbit tries to estimate calories burned from your walking, and if that were at all accurate, it could arguably be important to get an accurate step count. But it's not, because people are too different.
For most of a year I performed very detailed tracking of my caloric intake vs expenditure, including the use of a Fitbit step tracker and a cycling power meter, and plotted those against my weight gain/loss. What I found, once I had determined by base metabolic rate, was that estimating caloric expenditure with the power meter is highly accurate, but Fitbit's estimate of my caloric expenditure due to walking consistently overreported by about 30%.
That's not because Fitbit is doing anything wrong; their pedometers are quite accurate and I'm sure they're using reasonable models for estimating energy use based on the walker's weight and height. The fact that the overreporting rate was so consistent even though my body weight changed by almost 15% supports this. A friend who did the same experiment for a while found that for him the Fitbit-reported caloric expenditure only slightly overreported. He and I are different; perhaps his walking style is significantly less efficient than mine, or perhaps it's something in the composition of our diets (the human body is an imperfect heat engine; different sorts of foods are converted with varying efficiencies, and even the combinations matter).
Then I tried using my phone to measure my steps. It reported far fewer steps than my Fitbit did every day, which concerned me, so I did some tests. I walked some measured courses with both and counted my steps. The Fitbit was darned near perfect, being off by only a step or two in thousands -- and it's entirely possible that those errors were mine, not the device's, since I was counting mentally rather than using a counting device. The phone, was bad... but in a consistent way. In fact, I found that, for me, applying Fitbit's formula (using their web site) but my phone's step counts actually provided a much better estimate of caloric expenditure, when calibrated against weight change.
If you're actually trying to convert steps to calories, I think inter-person variability is a bigger factor than device accuracy, and if you're anal enough to actually try to calibrate the system, your calibration for the former will easily take care of the latter -- as long as you consistently use the same device.
However most people don't, and won't ever, do the controlled experimentation and analysis to calibrate themselves. So what most people really use a pedometer for is to (a) track relative physical activity level over time and (b) set and work towards goals of increasing activity. If what matters is relative activity, then an inaccurate but reasonably consistent device is just as good as a perfectly-accurate device.
And you probably already have a phone, which is a reasonably-consistent pedometer. If you already have a Nike Fuelband, that works, too.
(And now I'm waiting to see if my AC stalker shows up and crapfloods responses to this post.)
The point I'm trying to make is that encryption isn't the problem that need to be solved, it all the infrastructure around it that does. Mandatory encryption isn't any solution to anything useful.
Encryption is almost never the solution. As Schneier said "If you think cryptography is the solution to your problem, you don't understand cryptography, and you don't understand your problem." This is because cryptography merely moves problems. In the case of encryption it turns large secrets in to small ones. That actually is very useful, because the small secrets have different properties which in many case make them easier to manage.
With respect to network communications, I agree that encryption doesn't solve any of the problems, but it moves and shrinks a lot of problems and makes many of them dramatically more manageable. Its purpose is to reduce the scope of access to your data, limiting the number and location of people who might be able to see it. This makes solving the problems dramatically easier. In some cases it doesn't make them soluble (e.g. it won't protect you from a nation state who is targeting you), but in other cases it does (e.g. it will protect you from non-targeted trawling by a nation state who can only force disclosure of data with good justification).
Dude, my employer is mentioned on my/. profile; I've never made any attempt to hide it. And it really has nothing to do with being annoyed by your crapflooding. EVERYONE is annoyed by your crapflooding.
It's fine that you like using a hosts file to block ads. Really. And it's even fine posting about it a time or two on relevant slashdot threads. If you kept it to a reasonable volume you'd probably even get modded up. But the crapflooding is obnoxious.
Finally, my comment about an APK-block extension was a joke... but now you're making me think seriously about writing it.
Color me paranoid but this sounds like Google is going out of there weigh too weeken encryption in transport. For "national security" in homeland, amirite? God save the homeland!
Huh?
Google has pushed continually to increase the usage and the security of transport encryption. Google's SPDY, the basis for HTTP/2, was designed without any unencrypted mode; it's all TLS all the time. The IETF insisted on making unencrypted transport optional in HTTP/2, but you can be sure that Google won't take that option. Google's next-next generation replacement for HTTP, called QUIC, is a more radical redesign build on UDP rather than TCP, and also has no unencrypted mode. Encryption is baked so deeply into QUIC that it basically can't be removed. Google has also been instrumental in pushing the industry off of various weak versions of SSL/TLS, most recently leading the charge in removing SSL3 support. It was Google's researchers that brought Heartbleed, BEAST, CRIME and POODLE to light. Google Chrome was the first widely-used browser to implement certificate pinning, which was instrumental in the quick discovery of the DigiNotar CA compromise. Google engineers are working to develop a more final solution to the CA trust problem with the Certificate Transparency project. I could go on and on with all the great encryption-related work Google is doing (including my own small contributions to strong crypto on Android).
I think there's an extremely compelling argument to be made that Google is doing and has done more for internet transport encryption security than any other entity for quite some time.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google security engineer, not a Google spokesperson. The above is not an official statement but only my -- very strongly held -- personal opinion.)
I see no evidence that governments do want them taken down. I've seen no direction one way or another from government. I do, however, think that media companies are wise to refuse to show them. Why? Very simple: Because ISIS wants them to be seen. We can dig deeper to explore their rationale and analyze potential effects one way or the other, but i don't think we even need to go there. The mere fact that ISIS wants them to be seen is enough to make me conclude that everyone opposed to ISIS' behavior and tactics should not want them to be seen.
Blocking child pornography will mean that the general audience will not be aware of its existence, hence they will not put pressure on politicians to end child abuse.
Really? I've never seen any kiddie porn, and I'm both aware of its existence and seriously concerned about the children that suffer in its making, and potentially suffer due to desires that may be inflamed by its viewing.
Similarly, I've avoided seeing the graphic videos of ISIS beheadings, and I'm quite aware of that situation as well.
Your premise is questionable at best, which makes your conclusion worthless unless and until you can substantiate the premise.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed I've never seen any compelling reason for it being a bad idea other than "Well, some distros were defaulting to the odd version because the stable one was missing so much stuff!".
The problem was that the odd-numbered versions weren't getting enough testing, so the real testing didn't happen until the even-numbered release. So the system seriously slowed the pace of kernel development without significantly improving stability.
Well, part of the reason for his CURRENT change is that there's not much stuff going on between releases, indicating that the pace of update is dropping so low that it would no longer be a problem.
You don't follow kernel development very closely, I see. :-)
Get a job at Google, Apple, etc., and you'll re-learn that high school lesson tout de suite.
It wouldn't need to be so dramatic, just bump the phone with another device (or another phone.) NFC simply doesn't have the bandwidth required to do what you're suggesting, and it could easily be configured to be doable without unlocking the device.
+1
If this becomes a thing -- and I strongly suspect it will -- I know the Android security team will be looking for a way to enable it such that police cannot get anything other than your DL data. Perhaps even a "police stop mode" which enables a lock screen even for users who don't normally lock their phones and turns on the NFC. How to make the UI on that easy to invoke in a hurry when you're flustered, but still out of the way, since it's only needed on rare occasions, is an interesting question challenge. I don't have any idea at the moment how such a feature would work, or if it's the best approach, but the nature of the requirement is pretty clear: Users must be able to provide officers with DL information, but officers must not be able to get any additional data.
(Disclaimer: I'm a member of Google's Android security team, but the above represents only my own opinions not an official statement. You can certainly believe that they're opinions I will be sharing/pushing internally, though.)
(Aside: I think my AC stalker has abandoned me. APK, where are you?)
+1 to date-based.
Here's what I'd do if I were Linus: Bump to 4.0 now, then the next release go to (year-2010, month), so maybe 5.3. If there are two releases in a month (rare), add a third number to distinguish them.
The poll is expressed in joking terms, but Linus is quite serious about bumping the number.
Switch to 4.1 and go back to an odd/even system so 4.2 will be the next stable.
Linus already decided the odd/even system was a bad idea, and he had good reasons for it. I don't think there's any way he'll go back.
It did adhere to Semantic Versioning before v3.0.
No, it didn't. The numbers did have some meaning before v3.0, but not the semver meanings. Prior to v3, the first digit, the kernel version, was incremented only when there were major changes, as there were from 0 to 1 and 1 to 2. The second digit had special meaning; even values were for "stable" releases and odd values were for "development" releases. This ended when Linus realized that it wasn't getting him the sort of testing he wanted of the development releases, and was also encouraging too-large changes in the dev releases. So, as of 2.6.0, that ended and all new releases just incremented the third digit.
They dropped it because Linus felt the "39" in 2.6.39 was too big.
Sort of. Linus realized that the path he was on would never increment any number other than the third, so it wasn't just that 39 was too big, but that eventually it was going to be 2.6.539, and that it was silly to keep carrying the immutable "2.6" prefix. Hence 3.0.
Personally, I think he should just take the next step and go to a single integer... 4, 5, 6, etc. Either that or use dates. Say, (year-2010,month), so a release today would be 5.2. The release candidate process Linus uses and the pace of development pretty much ensure that there won't be a need for two releases in one month, but if there is a second release in one month a subminor could be added (e.g. 5.2.1).
No, coveting is more than just wanting. The text of the commandment (KJV, from memory so I may get a word or two wrong) is: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, nor thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s."
Coveting involves not just wanting something you don't have, but wanting to have something that belongs to someone else. It really is just a slightly strengthened form of "Thou shalt not steal" which makes it clear (in a foretaste of Christ's revision of the commandments in, e.g., Matthew 5:28) that merely wishing to do evil is is evil.
But there's nothing evil about winning a lottery. You aren't stealing anything when you win, and you aren't committing a milder form of theft when you wish to win. There's also no love of money implied by wishing to win a lottery, just as there is no love of money implied by choosing an educational path that leads to a remunerative career, etc. That sin is also one that requires a degree and a willingness to engage in unwholesome acts in order to achieve goals.
Like other forms of gambling, playing the lottery isn't wrong, it's just wasteful. So is most entertainment. Where gambling becomes wrong is when it is done to excess, when it destroys the financial security of the gambler. As long as you can treat gambling as an occasional small diversion, like seeing a movie, or going on an affordable (for your situation) vacation to Hawaii, etc., it's fine.
(My AC stalker seems to have abandoned me. <sniff>)
That's not much of a crapflood. Come on, man, you can do better than that.
YMMV, and if the issue has caused you deep personal problems you probably disagree.
I should clarify that I didn't mean you personally had deep problems; I meant that perhaps you had a loved one or other close personal relation who was deeply troubled, and that impacted you. Or maybe it was you; it's no shame to be an addict. It happens, and removing the shame is one of the biggest hurdles society needs to overcome to deal well with addiction.
I agree that there are lots of people for whom gambling is dangerously addictive, and that is bad, and sad. However, I'm sufficiently libertarian that I believe in the right of people to screw themselves if they choose to... and sufficiently socially-minded that I approve of programs that try to help such self-damaging people. IMO, the right solution to that sort of problem isn't to ban the danger, it's to help the people who fall into its clutches. YMMV, and if the issue has caused you deep personal problems you probably disagree.
(And, no, you're not my stalker. I can tell because you know how to spell and construct a grammatically-correct sentence. My stalker has been strangely quiet ever since I started calling him out on every post. I'm beginning to think he no longer cares. <sniff>)
Have you ever thought about stealing the lottery's entertainment? I can get your $2 entertainment for $0.
I think you missed the following sentence from my post:
I can do that (and sometimes do) without actually buying a lottery ticket, but paying the $2 for a ticket makes it dramatically more intense, and therefore entertaining.
Having the ticket convinces my statistically-incompetent lizard brain that there's a chance it will actually happen, because said statistically-incompetent lizard brain is completely incapable of grokking small probability events -- and that same lizard brain has a direct line to the pleasure centers.
You have an AC stalker? How do I get one of those? Hmmm - maybe post more than once every six months...
I can tell you how I did it... you know those APK crapflood posts, about how hosts files are great and AdBlock is evil? Just respond to a few of those criticizing the crapflooding.
Enjoy!
A decent private jet is a lot tougher to maintain with $40 million dollars.
Yeah, that was my thought: Gulfstream.
(Aside: Now we'll see if my AC stalker -- everyone should have one -- crapfloods responses to this post.).
Id be much more inclined to play the lottery if the pot were between 50k and 1m, as it would have a far lesser chance of ruining my life.
I think it's a lot of fun to try to figure out how you could handle the money without it ruining your life.
IMO the first step is to work very hard to arrange it so that no one knows that you won. If you find yourself in possession of a lottery ticket worth $100M+, your next action should be to hire an attorney to arrange to collect the prize anonymously. After that you should work with your attorney (and probably you'll end up with a staff of them) to figure out how to arrange a cover story that allows you to ease into a higher class of lifestyle and out of the need to be employed (assuming that's what you want) without making it obvious to family and friends that you're suddenly filthy rich. You want to have something that makes it look reasonable that you can afford to drive a nicer car and buy a nicer house and take a nice vacation and not work so much, but without giving anyone the idea that you could give them tens of thousands, or millions, of dollars if you wanted.
What's trickier is to figure out how to give money to the people you want to give money to without making it clear where it came from; what would really be ideal is if your cover story explained a sudden windfall for your close friends and relatives as well. You might have to adjust the recipient list in order to make it look like you're just one of the group, and not its center.
(Aside: Now we'll see if my AC stalker -- everyone should have one -- crapfloods responses to this post.)
You have insurance? Same thing: the expected return on insurance is also negative (insurers need to make a profit somehow, after all), and based on that value it seems silly to have it... until you ask the owner of the uninsured house that burned down.
Red herring. The expected value of your insurance is fairly close to its cost. More importantly, if the probability that your insurance would have to pay out were astronomically low, it wouldn't, in fact, make sense to buy insurance. But it's not. The probability that something will happen that causes you to need that insurance is non-negligible.
With that said, I find this conversation funny because both sides are ignoring the whole point of the article, which is that even if the cost of the lottery ticket exceeds its expected value (and it usually does), and even if the odds of winning are so small as to be negligible (for big prizes they always are), the lottery ticket often has net value for its worth as entertainment.
It's fun thinking about what you'd do if you suddenly had $200M. Really, it is. I can entertain myself for hours just thinking about strategies to manage it that wouldn't ruin my life by causing people to hound me for money, and yet still allow me to do the things that I want. I can do that (and sometimes do) without actually buying a lottery ticket, but paying the $2 for a ticket makes it dramatically more intense, and therefore entertaining. I don't buy many lottery tickets; I've probably purchased two or three in the last twenty years, but I've always felt like I got good value from them.
(Now we'll see if my AC stalker crapfloods responses to this post.)
Did you read the report before talking about short-sighted comments?
For those who don't want to read a 30-page report just to decide if you have a valid point (or if the report you linked is even relevant), I'll provide the summary that you should have provided, and try to guess at the argument you were trying to make (but didn't):
The report argued (in 2001, before the bubble and collapse) that much of the growth in housing was driven by relaxed lending which allowed more segments of the market to buy homes, and that this growth was driving an increase in prices. It further argued that if we saw a significant economic collapse, particularly a large rise in unemployment, that this effect could collapse.
Your argument, I presume, is that buying a house is risky because the price could collapse, leaving the borrower "upside down", holding a large debt they can't pay.
(Now we'll see if my AC stalker crapfloods responses to this post.)
I wonder what would have happened had they not had Google Translate. A boy?
Depending on the circumstances, the alternative could have been death of mother and/or baby. The alternative almost certainly would have been an even more unpleasant experience for the mother, with no ability to communicate with the EMTs about her state or the progress of the birth.
(Now let's see if my AC stalker shows up to crapflood responses to this post, too.)
"Fitbit only usable device, Nike Fuelband total shit".
I think they're all quite usable. In this space utility is not dependent on accuracy, for most people, because for most people it really doesn't matter if you get an extremely accurate step count. What matters is that you get a reasonable estimate of your activity level, as compared with you activity level measured on other days.
Fitbit tries to estimate calories burned from your walking, and if that were at all accurate, it could arguably be important to get an accurate step count. But it's not, because people are too different.
For most of a year I performed very detailed tracking of my caloric intake vs expenditure, including the use of a Fitbit step tracker and a cycling power meter, and plotted those against my weight gain/loss. What I found, once I had determined by base metabolic rate, was that estimating caloric expenditure with the power meter is highly accurate, but Fitbit's estimate of my caloric expenditure due to walking consistently overreported by about 30%.
That's not because Fitbit is doing anything wrong; their pedometers are quite accurate and I'm sure they're using reasonable models for estimating energy use based on the walker's weight and height. The fact that the overreporting rate was so consistent even though my body weight changed by almost 15% supports this. A friend who did the same experiment for a while found that for him the Fitbit-reported caloric expenditure only slightly overreported. He and I are different; perhaps his walking style is significantly less efficient than mine, or perhaps it's something in the composition of our diets (the human body is an imperfect heat engine; different sorts of foods are converted with varying efficiencies, and even the combinations matter).
Then I tried using my phone to measure my steps. It reported far fewer steps than my Fitbit did every day, which concerned me, so I did some tests. I walked some measured courses with both and counted my steps. The Fitbit was darned near perfect, being off by only a step or two in thousands -- and it's entirely possible that those errors were mine, not the device's, since I was counting mentally rather than using a counting device. The phone, was bad... but in a consistent way. In fact, I found that, for me, applying Fitbit's formula (using their web site) but my phone's step counts actually provided a much better estimate of caloric expenditure, when calibrated against weight change.
If you're actually trying to convert steps to calories, I think inter-person variability is a bigger factor than device accuracy, and if you're anal enough to actually try to calibrate the system, your calibration for the former will easily take care of the latter -- as long as you consistently use the same device.
However most people don't, and won't ever, do the controlled experimentation and analysis to calibrate themselves. So what most people really use a pedometer for is to (a) track relative physical activity level over time and (b) set and work towards goals of increasing activity. If what matters is relative activity, then an inaccurate but reasonably consistent device is just as good as a perfectly-accurate device.
And you probably already have a phone, which is a reasonably-consistent pedometer. If you already have a Nike Fuelband, that works, too.
(And now I'm waiting to see if my AC stalker shows up and crapfloods responses to this post.)
LOL. I have another AC stalker. It's been a while. I kind of missed it. I'll definitely have to ramp up my posting volume to keep you busy.
The point I'm trying to make is that encryption isn't the problem that need to be solved, it all the infrastructure around it that does. Mandatory encryption isn't any solution to anything useful.
Encryption is almost never the solution. As Schneier said "If you think cryptography is the solution to your problem, you don't understand cryptography, and you don't understand your problem." This is because cryptography merely moves problems. In the case of encryption it turns large secrets in to small ones. That actually is very useful, because the small secrets have different properties which in many case make them easier to manage.
With respect to network communications, I agree that encryption doesn't solve any of the problems, but it moves and shrinks a lot of problems and makes many of them dramatically more manageable. Its purpose is to reduce the scope of access to your data, limiting the number and location of people who might be able to see it. This makes solving the problems dramatically easier. In some cases it doesn't make them soluble (e.g. it won't protect you from a nation state who is targeting you), but in other cases it does (e.g. it will protect you from non-targeted trawling by a nation state who can only force disclosure of data with good justification).
Dude, my employer is mentioned on my /. profile; I've never made any attempt to hide it. And it really has nothing to do with being annoyed by your crapflooding. EVERYONE is annoyed by your crapflooding.
It's fine that you like using a hosts file to block ads. Really. And it's even fine posting about it a time or two on relevant slashdot threads. If you kept it to a reasonable volume you'd probably even get modded up. But the crapflooding is obnoxious.
Finally, my comment about an APK-block extension was a joke... but now you're making me think seriously about writing it.
Color me paranoid but this sounds like Google is going out of there weigh too weeken encryption in transport. For "national security" in homeland, amirite? God save the homeland!
Huh?
Google has pushed continually to increase the usage and the security of transport encryption. Google's SPDY, the basis for HTTP/2, was designed without any unencrypted mode; it's all TLS all the time. The IETF insisted on making unencrypted transport optional in HTTP/2, but you can be sure that Google won't take that option. Google's next-next generation replacement for HTTP, called QUIC, is a more radical redesign build on UDP rather than TCP, and also has no unencrypted mode. Encryption is baked so deeply into QUIC that it basically can't be removed. Google has also been instrumental in pushing the industry off of various weak versions of SSL/TLS, most recently leading the charge in removing SSL3 support. It was Google's researchers that brought Heartbleed, BEAST, CRIME and POODLE to light. Google Chrome was the first widely-used browser to implement certificate pinning, which was instrumental in the quick discovery of the DigiNotar CA compromise. Google engineers are working to develop a more final solution to the CA trust problem with the Certificate Transparency project. I could go on and on with all the great encryption-related work Google is doing (including my own small contributions to strong crypto on Android).
I think there's an extremely compelling argument to be made that Google is doing and has done more for internet transport encryption security than any other entity for quite some time.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google security engineer, not a Google spokesperson. The above is not an official statement but only my -- very strongly held -- personal opinion.)
I see no evidence that governments do want them taken down. I've seen no direction one way or another from government. I do, however, think that media companies are wise to refuse to show them. Why? Very simple: Because ISIS wants them to be seen. We can dig deeper to explore their rationale and analyze potential effects one way or the other, but i don't think we even need to go there. The mere fact that ISIS wants them to be seen is enough to make me conclude that everyone opposed to ISIS' behavior and tactics should not want them to be seen.
Blocking child pornography will mean that the general audience will not be aware of its existence, hence they will not put pressure on politicians to end child abuse.
Really? I've never seen any kiddie porn, and I'm both aware of its existence and seriously concerned about the children that suffer in its making, and potentially suffer due to desires that may be inflamed by its viewing.
Similarly, I've avoided seeing the graphic videos of ISIS beheadings, and I'm quite aware of that situation as well.
Your premise is questionable at best, which makes your conclusion worthless unless and until you can substantiate the premise.